The Interaction is the Brand ®

Welcome to the Interactive Brand website.

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Finding Your Stuff

Not the warmest of welcomes, eh? Well, that's likely because:

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  3. If you have heard about our services, our classes, or our reference material, you most likely want to start at Enosis Group, for whom Interactive Brand is a service mark.

Services

Interactive Brand services, classes, and books and materials focus on the behavioral aspects of branding as realized in the ordinary design components in interactive media. We can help you understand these aspects to improve your branding effort. We can help you in designing your interactive media to properly project your brand.

The Back Story

The Foundations

We first began the foundation work in 1998, with research on ACT/R and related cognitive models. We enhanced those models with newly published research and our own original research and modeling, demonstrating a connection in fundamentals unique to human interaction in the web, and by extension to common interactive systems and platforms.

In summary: there is a generative model (meaning in short: one can design to it; it is not merely descriptive) for directing user behavior in interactive media, which describes the long-arc and (shorter-horizon) click-time of a user's interaction within the mixed real- and virtual-space the user inhabits. The behavior described by this model can be in harmony with your interface's visual design, navigation, text, and related widgets, or in dissonance. This model helps us shape appropriate testing. Because it is generative, and therefore a design tool, it contributes to decisions about design evolution, including assessment of competitor actions and likely actions. Finally, an important subset of the model pertains to aspects often considered essential to the brand: meaning, when users interact with your media they are building up the true meaning of your brand. This realization of your brand is so powerful you cannot overcome it by merely presenting fancy stuff or interesting widgets ... even if it tests okay.

Thus the claim: The Interaction is the Brand ®

A Paper, of course; Not

After discussions at CHI98 and shortly afterwards, however, we decided publication would be too troublesome: several then grey-hairs strongly repudiated the suggested findings as not properly man-as-machine; others (while encouraging) shared their own stories of pressing against orthodoxy. A book proposal to MIT Press, with two other authors, was a possible vehicle, but after initial approval we did not agree to do the book.

Finally, Commercialization

Commercialization is the obvious alternative, right? Well, we realized these ideas in a web start-up proposal around that time -- with a great team of recognized folks in the area. We were jazzed; but we failed to raise the start-up capital. Also around that time, an aspect of these results were incorporated in a publication, Facilitated Discovery, first published in 1999 (personal publication, limited distribution). That document was the basis for the first teaching of and delivery of services on these principles, as part of the Facilitated Discovery offering by Interfacility, in its original composition as a joint effort between Marijke Rijsberman and Nick Ragouzis.

In 2001 and 2002 we greatly expended the traffic on the topic, teaching and offering services around these principles to agencies, in-house teams, and as part of consulting projects as diverse as retail establishments, the wine business and healthcare.

Interactive Brand Today

Since, and now, Interactive Brand is a service mark for consulting services on this topic offered through Enosis Group.

With the recent (c. 2006) increased interest in this topic it is likely that we will begin publishing, here, references to materials on the topic. Stay tuned.

If you have been to a class, participated in a session, or are a client, you will have the proper credentials for accessing your materials here. Dig them out, or contact your representative for assistance.

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